Former US president Barack Obama assailed President Donald Trump and Republicans on Friday, urging Democrats to restore a “semblance of sanity” to politics by voting in November’s elections.
via ‘Dangerous times’: Barack Obama accuses Donald Trump and Republicans of ‘abuses of power’
What’s keeping most Germans from getting a good night’s sleep? A survey has found that beating international terrorism, illegal immigration, and economic worries is none other than the US president. Well, his policies at least.
Anti Trump Rally In Berlin © Omer Messinger/Global Look Press Trump v the world? Belligerent unilateralism turning US into ‘rogue state’, analysts tell RT
Asking a sample of 2,400 Germans between June 8 and July 18 of this year, the multiple choice questionnaire found that 69 percent of Germans deemed Trump’s policies and attitude to allies were having a dangerous impact across the globe
via Trump tops list of Germans’ fears ahead of terrorism and immigration – survey finds — RT World News
It looks like Donald Trump daily twitter rants, weekly rallies and unhinged interviews where he rants against the press, Robert Muller and the Special Counsel, Jeff Sessions and Democrats is falling flat with potential voters. A poll by ABC/Washington Post posted on Friday showed a marked drop in the polls for Trump – only 36% approve, while 60% disapprove! That is a shocking number.
In summary, none of these numbers are good for Trump. He is losing support of the Republican party across all areas and independents seem to be leaning more towards the Democrats. This is terrible news for him with under 70 days until the elections. But it is great news for the rest of us!
Australia cannot stay silent about Trump
Donald Trump is the present spokesman for this derangement, the fear’s instrument and its preposterous embodiment. Trump is a racist, an ignoramus, a huckster and a creep. The human face of our US ally is contemptuous of human rights, the free press and any democratic norm or diplomatic protocol that doesn’t suit him, or which he thinks can be trashed to his political advantage. In addition to the trade war he recently started, the US under Trump’s “America First” banner has handed China undreamed of high ground and momentous strategic gifts by retreating from its role as Asia’s security provider. The Trans Pacific Partnership on which Australian governments set so much store, Trump knocked on the head. He flirts with authoritarian thugs while attacking, mocking and undermining democratic allies and institutions of the so-called rules-based international order. He has demolished truth, or what was left of it. He may even be Vladimir Putin’s stooge.
Populist politicians have alleged that increased crime in Sweden is linked to migration. The Sweden Democrats, a far-right party with links to neo-Nazism, have suggested freezing out asylum seekers and reducing the country’s immigration budget.
But when it comes to intentionally setting fire to cars, said Manne Gerell, a lecturer in criminology at Malmo University, such incidents have increased “big-time” over the past couple decades — but not in the past two or so years.
Across Sweden, around 1500 cars are burned each year, he said. The reasons can range from insurance fraud or hiding other crimes to social unrest and “random youth vandalism.”
In early 2017, riots broke out in a largely immigrant suburb near Stockholm. As The Post reported then, the riots occurred “just two days after President [Donald] Trump provoked widespread consternation by seeming to imply, incorrectly, that immigrants had perpetrated a recent spate of violence in Sweden.”
Sweden is far from the only place where youth have set cars on fire. On recent New Year’s Eves in France, young people have torched hundreds of cars. During recent end-of-year celebrations, around 1000 cars were set on fire a number of years in a row.
via Swedish prime minister livid after youths torch more than 100 cars
This is the uneducated POTUS who leads a Radicalized and Terrorist Nation. Osama bin Laden was an educated man who resisted.Who will be remembered histotically as a “good man”? (ODT)
Mr Trump managed to dent his everyman status when he suggested that American grocery shoppers have to show ID to buy stuff.
In this he quickly joined several presidents of various stripes before him who have demonstrated that they have no idea how much a gallon of milk costs and have, indeed, rarely queued to buy tinned tomatoes and a loaf of bread.
“We believe that only American citizens should vote in American elections, which is why the time has come for voter ID like everything else,” he said.
“Voter ID. If you go out and you want to buy groceries you need a picture on a card, you need ID.
“You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID, and you need your picture.
“In this country, the only time you don’t need it in many cases is when you want to vote for a president, when you want to vote for a senator, when you want to vote for a governor or a congressman. It’s crazy.”
Anti-politics is most evident in his emphasis on deregulation. The deregulatory clock defines the Trump presidency. With other presidencies, legislation matters. With Trump, the repeal of legislation matters. It is not just the repeal of Obamacare. It is the repeal of many constraints on economic and social behaviour. The deregulation model is simple: not to make regulations more efficient, just take a sledgehammer to them.
Three revocations are illustrative. The repeal of a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions; the repeal of an executive order protecting ocean, coastal and Great Lakes waters; and the revocation of flood standards for infrastructure projects. There have been more than seventy major environmental regulation rollbacks, and there will be more. It is the same for financial deregulation. The rollbacks of the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank Acts are proceeding. Future risks are priced to zero; the lessons from previous crises forgotten. It is deregulation without foresight.
The irony of the Trump presidency is that he is pushing us towards self-regulation when he has never regulated himself. He has failed to honour commitments to employees, to contractors, to students, to tenants, to other taxpayers and to the truth. He has failed to regulate himself. It is failure against which we should regulate.
The young ruler took a radically different path to his father, one that earned him the opportunity to outsmart Donald Trump
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US president Donald Trump shake hands at the conclusion of their meeting in Singapore.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US president Donald Trump shake hands at the conclusion of their meeting in Singapore. Photograph: Susan Walsh/APKim Jong-un was never destined to rule North Korea. It was never preordained he would be the one to accelerate the isolated nation’s nuclear weapons program, and force the US president, Donald Trump, to sit down for a meeting of equals.
Donald Trump shrugs off Kim’s human rights record: ‘He’s a tough guy’
Read moreBut through a combination of ruthless ambition and luck, Kim achieved what no other leader of North Korea has, recognition as the head of a nuclear power and international statesman. The boy dictator went head-to-head with Trump and won.
via Kim Jong-un: The story of the boy dictator who bested the US president | World news | The Guardian
“More than 40% of the minors arrested were taken from home in the middle of the night, after being woken up.In some cases, the arrest is carried out quietly: soldiers knock on the door, wait for it to be opened, ask a few questions, tell the parents to wake up their son, and allow him to get dressed.”
It continues, after noting the terror this procedure strikes in the hearts of these ordinary Palestinians,
“With rare exceptions, the soldiers handcuff the minors as soon as they arrest them, or immediately after leaving the home. The reports indicate that in about 80% of the cases, the soldiers also blindfold the minors. In this state, the minors are then transported . . . Many of the minors reported that during transit, soldiers swore at them,
threatened them and even beat them.”The Israeli army takes away the children, sometimes in the dark of night, without informing the parents of the minors.
via In Quoting Bible on Tearing Children from Parents, Sessions Echoes Israeli Practices
“What the world needs is less nationalism and more internationalism.”
via Day to Day Politics: Was there ever a greater fool? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
North Korean Vice Chairman Kim Yong Chol met with President Donald Trump at the White House this week. As part of its efforts to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, the Trump administration is conducting negotiations with one of the world’s most brutal regimes. Human Rights Watch has described North Korea’s political prison camps as “the modern day equivalent of the Russian Gulag where prisoners are starved, beaten, tortured and worked to death.” North Korean guards club starving children to death for stealing rice, a UN report explained. Mothers have reportedly been required to observe the infanticide of their newborn babies as a form of punishment.
Despite these ongoing, egregious human rights violations, the White House is pursuing talks with Pyongyang to further U.S. interests. Washington’s engagement with Kim Jong Un makes its policy of refusing to speak with the Palestinian leadership in Gaza even more confounding. While Hamas has carried out horrific attacks, it would be hard to argue that the Islamist group’s actions, especially those in the past year, are more abhorrent than those of North Korea. If advancing U.S. interests is enough of a reason to negotiate with North Korea despite the government’s egregious human rights record, then the same logic must be considered with Hamas.
via If Trump talks with North Korea, why should the U.S. boycott Hamas? | +972 Magazine
Members of the Coeur d’Alene, or Schitsu’umsh, Tribe on the Desmet Reservation in Idaho circa 1907. (Wikimedia Commons)
This knowledge seems rudimentary, and yet it’s not: The same ships that transported the “American dream” from 15th century Europe likewise delivered a nightmare to indigenous lands now known as America—a nightmare that would persist for centuries for millions of indigenous people, African slaves and their many descendants. But it was far beyond a nightmare. It all was callously and painfully real.
This knowledge also seems rudimentary, and yet it’s not: Indigenous communities today bear the stubborn scars and residual societal ills stemming directly from colonization: being dehumanized, disenfranchised and imprisoned in our own lands, confined to desolate reservations, and brutally ripped from the lifeways and teachings that sustained us for millennia.
via Trump Says Settlers ‘Tamed a Continent.’ Now for the Other Side.
Palestine has submitted a formal referral to the International Criminal Court in the Hague over Israeli sniping with live fire at peaceful Gaza protesters this spring, which killed some 60 persons and literally wounded thousands.
Palestine, which is a cautious and timid government, had earlier declined to go to the ICC, in hopes instead of reaching a negotiated settlement. The Trump decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, however, forestalled a negotiated settlement on that issue. Israel’s illegal flooding of its citizens onto Palestinian property in the West Bank and refusal to negotiate any freeze in squatter settlements has also convinced Palestine that the US-Israeli “peace process” is a cover for slow genocide. Ironically, it was Trump’s lack of diplomatic grace that in large part impelled this step.
via Palestine takes Israel to Int’l Criminal Court at Hague over Gaza Massacre
Days after the Parkland shooting, Trump said that elected officials should be ready to “fight” the powerful NRA lobby group. Early this month he embraced that group, telling its annual meeting in Dallas “your Second Amendment rights are under siege” and, as long as he was President, their guns would never be taken away.
Israel has made many such changes to Occupied Territories. For example, the Golan Heights still belongs to Syria despite the many illegal settlements built there, however much stolen oil is extracted there, or however many field hospitals for Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and Al-Qaeda fighters Israel erects there. That like Jerusalem, the Golan has been illegally annexed makes no difference at all in law nor to every other government in the world. Except Trump’s government.
Donald Trump’s trashing of the Iran nuclear deal this week was not just an attack on Iranian sovereign interests. The US president was also poking European allies in the eye.
How obscenely ironic. Embassies traditionally symbolize diplomacy and peace. The opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem was occasioned by a grotesque baptism of murder of Palestinians, heralding wider war in the Middle East.
Donald Trump thrives on chaos, and where it does not already exist he seeks ways to create it.
It seems he believes chaos will throw up unexpected opportunities where more considered and cautious approaches have produced nothing but a logjam.
Certainly the Middle East looks like a series of immense logjams. Others, such as Mr Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, may prefer to loosen them with a crowbar after weighing carefully the likely consequences; Mr Trump reaches for the dynamite.
Negotiated in July 2015, the deal, officially dubbed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, stipulated that Iran rid itself of nuclear fuel if the United States waived sanctions that had been crippling the nation’s economy. As part of the deal, a UN nuclear agency would monitor Iran’s fidelity to the agreement and, thus far, the agency has determined that Iran has complied. After 10 years, restrictions on research and development would lighten, and after 15 years, Iran would be able to produce nuclear fuel, but not in service of a weapons program. Along with the lack of a provision preventing Iran from testing ballistic missiles, this “sunset clause” has been pointed to by Trump as one of the principle reasons the deal is a “disaster.”
Here are three immediate takeaways from Trump’s decision today.
1. Iran is now free to build a nuclear bomb
2. Trump’s decision will likely alienate allies
3. The abandonment may hinder an impending deal with North Korea
via Iran Deal: Trump’s Withdrawal Will Have Major Consequences – Rolling Stone
Making policy by destroying the reputations of middle management in the government is of course highly destructive to the democratic process.
Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker now reports that the Trump aides who targeted former Obama administration officials Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl used the Israeli Black Cube agency, the same one deployed by Harvey Weinstein to keep his many victims of sexual harassment in line. It advertises itself as being able to provide the best former Mossad agents for the job (but if they are the best why are they former?)
I mind this behavior quite a lot and fear it won’t get the traction it deserves among the press and the public.
via Treason: Obama Iran Deal Officials targeted by Trump via Israeli Black Cube
US President Donald Trump’s new lawyer Rudy Giuliani says the President repaid his personal lawyer Michael Cohen for a $US130,000 ($179,000) payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump reimbursed the money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, according to GiulianiTrump had told reporters that he was not aware of the payment and that he didn’t know where Cohen had gotten the money.
Giuliani made the revelation during an appearance on Fox News’ Hannity.
via Donald Trump reimbursed Cohen for $130k payment to porn star: Giuliani
Demographers tell us that the United States of America will sometime, in the next couple of decades, become the first nation on Earth to be majority minority. For many of us, that is a cause for celebration. It is, in part, what makes this country so unique and miraculous.
For many Americans — particularly those white Americans who have in one way or another benefited from the privileges that come with their particular skin tone — this is a very scary thing. It’s becoming more and more difficult to say with certainty what it means to be “American.” As everyone knows, the easiest way to identify yourself is in opposition to another. Thus, a large swath of Americans feel as though their very identity is under attack. They are desperately looking for scapegoats, for opposing forces to help them define who they are.
via Fired CNN host Reza Aslan: “It’s time to treat Donald Trump as an enemy of the state” | Salon.com
Personally, I believe that historical rendering of events is not only categorically wrong, it is simply dangerous because it condones the utterly reckless behavior displayed by the Trump administration as a method for solving crisis.
via Peace breaks out on the Korean peninsula despite – not because of – Washington hawks — RT Op-ed
TRUMP: A percentage of the legal work, a tiny, tiny fraction, but Michael would represent me, and represent me on some things. He represents me with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal. He represented me and, you know, from what I see, he did absolutely nothing wrong. There were no campaign funds.
via Oops! Trump Puts Himself In Legal Jeopardy In Fox & Friends Rant | Crooks and Liars
It was a promise of trickle down Bullshit and Trump delivered
“President Trump and Republicans gave huge tax cuts to big drug companies, big oil, and other corporations, but corporations are giving back little—if anything—to working families.”
by
via New Analysis of GOP Tax Scam Shows “Corporate Cheapskates” Not Sharing Windfall With Workers
“We have never had a president, at least in the modern era, whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals,” she writes in her chapter on the US. “[Donald] Trump has spoken harshly about the institutions and principles that make up the foundation of open government, in the process he has systematically degraded political discourse in the US, shown an astonishing disregard for facts, libelled his predecessor, threatened to lock up political rivals, bullied members of his own administration, referred to mainstream journalists as enemies of the American people, spread falsehoods about the integrity of the US electoral process, touted mindlessly nationalistic economic and trade policies and nurtured a paranoid bigotry toward the followers of one of the world’s foremost religious.”
via Fascism ‘goes unnoticed until it’s too late’: Albright sounds dire warning on Trump
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt announced a plan to revise existing tailpipe standards that were going to apply for model years 2022 to 2025, saying the current standards “are not appropriate” and were set “too high.” Pruitt also said the EPA is re-examining the state of California’s historic ability to adopt tailpipe standards that are more ambitious than the federal government’s.
via How Trump’s Gutting of Tailpipe Standards will make China Auto Leader Worldwide
These days, there’s a significant consensus here that the Iraq invasion was a “terrible mistake,” a “tragic error,” or even the “single worst foreign policy decision in American history.” Fewer voices are saying what it really was: a war crime. In fact, that invasion fell into the very category that led the list of crimes at the Nuremberg tribunal, where high Nazi officials were tried for their actions during World War II. During the negotiations establishing that tribunal and its rules, it was (ironically, in view of later events) the United States that insisted on including the crime of “waging a war of aggression” and on placing it at the head of the list. The U.S. position was that all the rest of Germany’s war crimes sprang from this first “crime against peace.”
via Trump’s Fascination with appointing War Criminals to High Office
International Affairs
Twenty-six years ago the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its military commitments, its oppressive surveillance bureaucracy, and its regime’s loss of legitimacy. That experience has lessons for Trump’s America writes Ian McAuley.
via Donald Trump: Making America Great or Keeping America Poor? – New Matilda
Like many American presidents before him, Donald Trump held court in the East Room of the White House, surrounded by chandeliers, gold curtains, mirrors and portraits of George Washington and Theodore Roosevelt. He had a message for the press: “You know, I read where, ‘Oh, gee, maybe people don’t want to work for Trump.’ Believe me, everybody wants to work in the White House … I could take any position in the White House, and I’ll have a choice of the 10 top people having to do with that position. Everybody wants to be there.”
Donald Trump’s top economic adviser Gary Cohn quits
That was around 3.45pm on Tuesday at a press conference. Less than two hours later, the White House that everyone wants to work for was struggling to explain its latest empty desk. Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser, had decided to walk away.
Another one bites the dust. There has never been such a rapid turnover of personnel in a US administration in modern times. If anything, the stampede to the exits appears to be accelerating, raising fears of a “brain drain” that will leave key jobs unfilled and make it ever harder to recruit new talent.
via ‘Hollowed out’ White House: Trump is on a dangerous path toward no advisers | US news | The Guardian
Austin, Texas: Deadly poisonings and attacks on Kremlin-linked figures are likely to meet little resistance from the White House, an American defence expert says.
As Cold War-era understandings on permissible spy behaviour unravel, there has been little US pressure to counter Russia’s suspected activities, Georgetown University national security professor Mark Jacobson told Fairfax Media.
“During the Cold War the Soviets were constrained by the threat of a US reaction,” Jacobson said. “Today there is no threat of action by this White House.”
via Where is the White House pressure on Russia over London poisoning?
Steele compiled a dossier containing astonishing allegations against the then presidential candidate, including a claim the Russians had cultivated Mr Trump and traded favours with him for at least five years, and handed him intelligence from the Kremlin on Hillary Clinton and other political rivals.
The Telegraph reported that if the Kremlin believed Skripal helped compile the Trump dossier, it could provide a motive for the assassination attempt in Salisbury.
A former Russian construction magnate told Channel 4 News Skripal was “working in cyber-security and every month going to the [Russian] embassy to meet military intelligence officers”.
The Telegraph said a “hit squad” was dispatched by the Kremlin to assassinate Skripal, to send a message that traitors were not tolerated.
via Poisoned Russian spy linked to Trump dossier author: reports
Why spin the unspinnable? Just leave it out there as it is, Sarah. “The president is speaking for himself” is all that needed to be said.
Some of the biggest names in corporate America are coming under mounting pressure to cut ties with the National Rifle Association as gun safety activists on Friday intensified calls for a boycott in the wake of last week’s Florida high school massacre.
via ‘Bad business’: Apple, Google, Amazon pressured to cut ties with NRA
In sum, Trump is either hiding something so threatening to himself, or he’s criminally incompetent to be commander in chief. It is impossible yet to say which explanation for his behaviour is true, but it seems highly likely that one of these scenarios explains Trump’s refusal to respond to Russia’s direct attack on our system – a quiescence that is simply unprecedented for any US president in history. Russia is not our friend. It has acted in a hostile manner. And Trump keeps ignoring it all.
What Robert Mueller delivered in Friday’s indictment were the first charges for interfering in the 2016 presidential election. He is getting to the heart of the matter.
Robert Mueller charges 13 Russians with interfering in US election to help Trump
Read moreThe special counsel also buried once and for all Donald Trump’s mealy-mouthed obfuscations over whether Russia was responsible for this confidence trick of breathtaking scope and scale. Former CIA director-general Michael Hayden has described it as the political equivalent of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
But what Mueller has not yet produced is compelling evidence that demonstrates the president or his campaign knowingly coordinated with Russians to cheat Hillary Clinton out of the election.
It’s so heartwarming to hear this from the man who promised to end “this American carnage” in his inaugural address. Of course, at the time he was talking about gang murders, just as he did in his State of the Union address last month.
He must have forgotten to mention school shootings with assault weapons, like the AR-15 used at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida. It was the same assault weapon used at the Sutherland Springs church in Texas in November. It was the same assault weapon used in the Las Vegas massacre the month before that.
It’s as if no politician could talk about protecting airplane cockpits after 9/11 because all we could was pray and send our condolences.
Trump’s refusal to release the response of the Democratic minority on the House Intelligence Committee to the declassified Nunes memo cherry-picking intelligence reports has been decried as a politicization of intelligence. It has been pointed out by legal scholar Laurence Tribe that Congress could in any case override Trump and declassify the Democratic response itself, if the GOP representatives wanted to. So this controversy isn’t about Trump or Nunes. It is about a Republican Party determined not to play fair.
While these analyses is certainly correct, they miss a crucial problem with our declining democracy in the United States: classified documents are inherently undemocratic and should be rare.
via A Crisis of Democracy: Trump’s block of Dem Response to Nunes
Both Trump and Netanyahu want to secure their rule by attacking liberal, democratic forces. But in order to do so, they need two things: a wall and the promise of eternal war.
via A wall and a war: Two things every fascist regime needs | +972 Magazine
The Game Plan
Nunes and Trump know that Rupert Murdoch’s lying Fox Cable News will be happy to become The Nunes Memo Network 24/7. They know that Sinclair radio stations (which have virtually taken over radio news nationally) will play it up big time. They know that NewsMax and Breitbart and other right wing webzines will beat this drum continually. They know that YouTube celebrities with millions of followers such as Alex Jones will spread the word of the perfidy of the FBI, or the “Kenyan FBI” as they likely will call it.
They already have 36% of voters and just need to create doubts in or support for Trump in 15% of voters who are independents, and they keep winning politically.
Research shows that people with idees fixes don’t change their minds just because they are presented with factual information that challenges them. In fact, they dig in. Thus, by the time the minority Democratic report comes out, many Republicans will be so wedded to the Nunes narrative that it will be very difficult to dislodge their certainty.
This photo alone shows the power of the media to misinform.
President Trump during the 2018 State of the Union address. (D. Myles Cullen / White House)
The whole thing is kind of silly.
That’s kind of how the State of the Union speech is. What’s the point anymore? These annual pomp-and-circumstance State of the Union speeches are only about 100 years old. Before that, the updates were simply written.
Our entertainment devices have changed. Now, we have the internet, we have news websites, we have 24-hour news stations galore.
Not to mention Twitter.
Do we really need a president to give, in a formal annual speech, his self-interested perspective of what’s going on?
Of course, presidents—no matter who—are going to say that they are the greatest thing since McRib sandwiches.
via Bad News for Trump Haters: He’s Turning Into a Politician
